Techniques for designing better presentations (before you get to the delivery stage!)
This blog a resource for presenters — not pro-speakers, but real people who need to make presentations as part of their 'day job'.
I have to be honest, this blog only gets updated every month or so. If you want a bit more, sign up for the (almost) weekly newsletter instead called "TalkTactics".
Creating a presentation is one thing – checking it is another. (Notice that I don’t say ‘writing’ your presentation, because you shouldn’t be thinking that way.) The painful fact is, however, that mistakes on your slides can give people who don’t want to listen or change their ways an excuse not to do so undermine …
Read more “Proofing (and otherwise checking) your presentation”
Welcome back. Part one is here. 😉 So now we know the problems faced by charities in their presentations, what’s the solution? To be honest and brutal, they’re not very different from the ones faced by any business. For reports which are basically reports, the rules are pretty much exactly the same (in principle). The …
At the risk of being obvious and boring, I’m going to split this blog into two, big parts.This week it’s why charities need to be particularly good at presenting, and then their particular presentation-problems. Ready? Next week I’ll look at what charities can do about it all… Why charities need to be give presentations and …
I’ve seen lots of doctors make presentations and the brutal version of this blog post could be, frankly “not much”. But that’s odd, because there’s a lot of good research that’s been carried out to see how to improve presentations for medical students. Let’s face it, they’ve got a lot of information to take in, …
Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room first. Sometimes I don’t do anything as well as I could because I’m lazy. That includes making presentations. There, I’ve said it. I like to pretend to myself I’m not actually lazy, just “efficient” – but that’s in much the same way as a friend of mine …
Read more “Why I don’t make my presentations as good as they could be”
Foxtrot Oscar? Sorry, what? Well to be honest, I’ve just sworn. Quick badly in fact. If you know what I’ve done great, and welcome to the club. If you don’t let me explain that Foxtrot, Oscar, Whiskey and Tango are part of the phonetic alphabet used when you really, really, don’t want to have the …
Read more “Foxtrot Oscar presentations – or Whisky Tango Foxtrot”
I spent very nearly two and a half decades as a university researcher. My post – in fact more or less my entire research unit, the largest social science research unit in the UK and the second most influential in the world – was funded by taking contracts to investigate specific questions. Many of these …
Look, you know it, I know it and your audience knows it… Boring presentations bore your audiences and as a result, no one takes in what you’re trying to communicate. No one acts on what you’ve said, because, frankly, no one listened. And if anyone did, they don’t care. (Admit it, you’ve probably been guilty …
Read more “How to have creative ideas for your presentations.”
Right then… let’s face it. Most presentations fail because (as I’ve said until I’m blue in the face!) presenters don’t know what it is they’re trying to do. I’ve posted about that before and I’ll post about it again next week but here are the basics. Decide what effect you want to have in your …
The StoryMaking System is the result of reading (in mind-numbing detail) over 400 peer-reviewed research papers, dozens of books, thousands of ours of observational research and blood sweat and tears!
It's the framework for designing a presentation which gives you the fastest way to getting something is (almost) guaranteed to work. It gives your audience what they need - and only what they need - to be impacted.
The key elements are:
This will close in 20 seconds